German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) discusses "facticity"[1] as the "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of individual existence, which is to say we are "thrown into the world." By this, he is not only referring to a brute fact, or the factuality of a concrete historical situation, e.g., "born in the '80s." Facticity is something that already informs and has been taken up in existence, even if it is unnoticed or left unattended. As such, facticity is not something we come across and directly behold. In moods, for example, facticity has an enigmatic appearance, which involves both turning toward and away from it. For Heidegger, moods are conditions of thinking and willing to which they must in some way respond. The thrownness of human existence (or Dasein) is accordingly disclosed through moods.

In the mid-20th Century works of French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, facticity signifies all of the concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited. For example, these may include the time and place of birth, a language, an environment, an individual's previous choices, as well as the inevitable prospect of their death. For example: currently, the situation of a person who is born without legs precludes their freedom to walk on the beach; if future medicine were to develop a method of growing new legs for that person, their facticity might no longer exclude this activity.

Facticity plays a key part in Quentin Meillassoux's philosophical project to challenge the thought-world relationship of correlationism. It is defined by him as “the absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.”[3]

1.
Philosophy
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Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument and systematic presentation, classic philosophical questions include, Is it possible to know anything and to prove it. However, philosophers might also pose more practical and concrete questions such as, is it better to be just or unjust. Historically, philosophy encompassed any body of knowledge, from the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, natural philosophy encompassed astronomy, medicine and physics. For example, Newtons 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics, in the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize. In the modern era, some investigations that were part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology. Other investigations closely related to art, science, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy, for example, is beauty objective or subjective. Are there many scientific methods or just one, is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy. Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, since the 20th century, professional philosophers contribute to society primarily as professors, researchers and writers. Traditionally, the term referred to any body of knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is related to religion, mathematics, natural science, education. This division is not obsolete but has changed, Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences, especially astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology. Moral philosophy has birthed the social sciences, but still includes value theory, metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic, mathematics and philosophy of science, but still includes epistemology, cosmology and others. Many philosophical debates that began in ancient times are still debated today, colin McGinn and others claim that no philosophical progress has occurred during that interval. Chalmers and others, by contrast, see progress in philosophy similar to that in science, in one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture and a search for knowledge. In that sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions such as how are we to live, a broad and impartial conception of philosophy then, finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality, morality and life in all world civilizations. Socrates was an influential philosopher, who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was a pursuer of wisdom

2.
Positivism
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Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations. Thus, information derived from experience, interpreted through reason and logic. Positivism holds that knowledge is found only in this derived knowledge. Verified data received from the senses are known as empirical evidence, Positivism also holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. Introspective and intuitive knowledge is rejected, as are metaphysics and theology, Comte argued that, much as the physical world operates according to gravity and other absolute laws, so does society, and further developed positivism into a Religion of Humanity. The English noun positivism was re-imported in the 19th century from the French word positivisme, the corresponding adjective has been used in similar sense to discuss law since the time of Chaucer. Wilhelm Dilthey popularized the distinction between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaften, the consideration that laws in physics may not be absolute but relative, and, if so, this might be more true of social sciences, was stated, in different terms, by G. B. Vico, in contrast to the positivist movement, asserted the superiority of the science of the human mind, Positivism asserts that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific. Émile Durkheim reformulated sociological positivism as a foundation of social research, Wilhelm Dilthey, in contrast, fought strenuously against the assumption that only explanations derived from science are valid. Dilthey was in part influenced by the historicism of Leopold von Ranke, at the turn of the 20th century the first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, rejected the doctrine, thus founding the antipositivist tradition in sociology. Later antipositivists and critical theorists have associated positivism with scientism, science as ideology, but can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing. If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting, Logical positivists rejected metaphysical speculation and attempted to reduce statements and propositions to pure logic. Strong critiques of this approach by philosophers such as Karl Popper, Willard Van Orman Quine and Thomas Kuhn have been highly influential, in historiography the debate on positivism has been characterized by the quarrel between positivism and historicism. Arguments against positivist approaches in historiography include that history differs from sciences like physics and ethology in subject matter and that much of what history studies is nonquantifiable, and therefore to quantify is to lose in precision. Experimental methods and mathematical models do not generally apply to history, Positivism in the social sciences is usually characterized by quantitative approaches and the proposition of quasi-absolute laws. A significant exception to this trend is represented by cultural anthropology, in psychology the positivist movement was influential in the development of operationalism. Economic thinker Friedrich Hayek rejected positivism in the sciences as hopelessly limited in comparison to evolved and divided knowledge. For example, much legislation falls short in contrast to pre-literate or incompletely defined common or evolved law, in contemporary social science, strong accounts of positivism have long since fallen out of favour

3.
Martin Heidegger
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Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is acknowledged to be one of the most original. His first and best known book, Being and Time, though unfinished, is one of the philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being, and asks the question about it, namely, Human being, for Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. Heideggers later work includes criticisms of technologys instrumentalist understanding in the Western tradition as enframing, treating all of Nature as a reserve on call for human purposes. Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Germany, the son of Johanna, raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church that adhered to the First Vatican Council of 1870, which was observed mainly by the poorer class of Meßkirch. Heidegger was short and sinewy, with piercing eyes. He enjoyed outdoor pursuits, being proficient at skiing. In the two following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent. He served as a soldier during the year of World War I, working behind a desk. During the 1930s, critics of Heideggers espousal of a Nazi-style rhetoric of martial manliness noted the unheroic nature of his service in WWI, in 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp, Heideggers students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Gunther Anders, and Hans Jonas. Following on from Aristotle, he began to develop in his lectures the main theme of his philosophy, the question of the sense of being. He extended the concept of subject to the dimension of history and concrete existence, which he found prefigured in such Christian thinkers as Saint Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Luther and he also read the works of Dilthey, Husserl, and Max Scheler. In 1927, Heidegger published his main work Sein und Zeit, when Husserl retired as Professor of Philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburgs election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg im Breisgau for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers and his students at Freiburg included Arendt, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse and Ernst Nolte. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928, Heidegger was elected rector of the University on 21 April 1933, and joined the National Socialist German Workers Party on 1 May

4.
Jean-Paul Sartre
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Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology and his work has also influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to influence these disciplines. Sartre was also noted for his relationship with prominent feminist. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, Sartres introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism and Humanism, originally presented as a lecture. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature but refused it, saying that he always declined official honours, Jean-Paul Sartre was born on 21 June 1905 in Paris as the only child of Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin and the first cousin of Nobel Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, when Sartre was two years old, his father died of a fever overseas. When he was twelve, Sartres mother remarried, and the moved to La Rochelle. As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergsons essay Time and Free Will and he attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris. It was at ENS that Sartre began his lifelong, sometimes fractious, perhaps the most decisive influence on Sartres philosophical development was his weekly attendance at Alexandre Kojèves seminars, which continued for a number of years. From his first years in the École Normale, Sartre was one of its fiercest pranksters, in 1927, his antimilitarist satirical cartoon in the revue of the school, coauthored with Georges Canguilhem, particularly upset the director Gustave Lanson. Many newspapers, including Le Petit Parisien, announced the event on 25 May, thousands, including journalists and curious spectators, showed up, unaware that what they were witnessing was a stunt involving a Lindbergh look-alike. The publics resultant outcry forced Lanson to resign, in 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted philosopher, writer, and feminist. The two became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though they were not monogamous, the first time Sartre took the exam to become a college instructor, he failed. He took it a time and virtually tied for first place with Beauvoir, although Sartre was eventually awarded first place in his class. Sartre was drafted into the French Army from 1929 to 1931 and he later argued in 1959 that each French person was responsible for the collective crimes during the Algerian War of Independence. From 1931 until 1945, Sartre taught at various lycées of Le Havre, Laon, in 1932, Sartre discovered Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a book that had a remarkable influence on him. In 1933–34, he succeeded Raymond Aron at the Institut français dAllemagne in Berlin where he studied Edmund Husserls phenomenological philosophy, Aron had already advised him in 1930 to read Emmanuel Levinass Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. The Neo-Hegelian revival led by Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite in the 1930s inspired a generation of French thinkers, including Sartre

5.
Edmund Husserl
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Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality, in his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserls thought profoundly influenced the landscape of twentieth-century philosophy, and he remains a notable figure in contemporary philosophy and beyond. Husserl studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy under Franz Brentano, following an illness, he died at Freiburg in 1938. Husserl was born in 1859 in Proßnitz, a town in the Margraviate of Moravia, which was then in the Austrian Empire, and he was born into a Jewish family, the second of four children. His childhood was spent in Proßnitz, where he attended the elementary school, then Husserl traveled to Vienna to study at the Realgymnasium there, followed next by the Staatsgymnasium in Olomouc. At the University of Leipzig from 1876 to 1878, Husserl studied mathematics, physics, at Leipzig he was inspired by philosophy lectures given by Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of modern psychology. Then he moved to the Frederick William University of Berlin in 1878 where he continued his study of mathematics under Leopold Kronecker, in Berlin he found a mentor in Thomas Masaryk, then a former philosophy student of Franz Brentano and later the first president of Czechoslovakia. There Husserl also attended Friedrich Paulsens philosophy lectures, in 1881 he left for the University of Vienna to complete his mathematics studies under the supervision of Leo Königsberger. At Vienna in 1883 he obtained his PhD with the work Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung, evidently as a result of his becoming familiar with the New Testament during his twenties, he asked to be baptized into the Lutheran Church in 1886. Husserls father Adolf had died in 1884, at times Husserl saw his goal as one of moral renewal. Following his PhD in mathematics, he returned to Berlin to work as the assistant to Karl Weierstrass, yet already Husserl had felt the desire to pursue philosophy. Then professor Weierstrass became very ill, Husserl became free to return to Vienna where, after serving a short military duty, he devoted his attention to philosophy. In 1884 at the University of Vienna he attended the lectures of Franz Brentano on philosophy, Brentano introduced him to the writings of Bernard Bolzano, Hermann Lotze, J. Stuart Mill, and David Hume. There, under Stumpfs supervision, he wrote Über den Begriff der Zahl in 1887, in 1887 he married Malvine Steinschneider, a union that would last over fifty years. In 1892 their daughter Elizabeth was born, in 1893 their son Gerhart, Elizabeth would marry in 1922, and Gerhart in 1923, Wolfgang, however, became a casualty of the First World War. Gerhart would become a philosopher of law, contributing to the subject of law, teaching in the USA. Following his marriage Husserl began his teaching career in philosophy

6.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art and he was on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine established by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945. At the core of Merleau-Pontys philosophy is an argument for the foundational role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, linguistics and he was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences and especially with descriptive psychology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908 in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime, France and his father died in 1913 when Merleau-Ponty was five years old. He attended Edmund Husserls Paris Lectures in February 1929, in 1929, Merleau-Ponty received his DES degree from the University of Paris, on the basis of the thesis La Notion de multiple intelligible chez Plotin, directed by Émile Bréhier. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930, an article published in French newspaper Le Monde in October 2014 makes the case of recent discoveries about Merleau-Pontys likely authorship of the novel Nord. Convergent sources from close friends seem to leave little doubt that Jacques Heller was a pseudonym of the 20-year-old Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty taught first at the Lycée de Beauvais and then got a fellowship to do research from the Caisse nationale de la recherche scientifique. From 1934–1935 he taught at the Lycée de Chartres, after teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952. In his youth he had read Karl Marxs writings and Sartre even claimed that Merleau-Ponty converted him to Marxism and their friendship ended over a quarrel as he became disillusioned about communism, while Sartre still endorsed it. Merleau-Ponty died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53 and he is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty developed the concept of the body-subject as an alternative to the Cartesian cogito and this distinction is especially important in that Merleau-Ponty perceives the essences of the world existentially. Consciousness, the world, and the body as a perceiving thing are intricately intertwined. The phenomenal thing is not the object of the natural sciences. Things are that upon which our body has a grip, while the grip itself is a function of our connaturality with the worlds things, the world and the sense of self are emergent phenomena in an ongoing becoming. The thing transcends our view, but is manifest precisely by presenting itself to a range of possible views, the object of perception is immanently tied to its background—to the nexus of meaningful relations among objects within the world. Because the object is inextricably within the world of meaningful relations, each object is a mirror of all others

7.
Hannah Arendt
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Johanna Hannah Arendt was a German-born Jewish American political theorist. She escaped Europe during the Holocaust, becoming an American citizen and her works deal with the nature of power and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. The Hannah Arendt Prize is named in her honor, Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden, the daughter of Martha and Paul Arendt. She grew up in Königsberg and Berlin, at the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. Arendts family was assimilated and she later remembered, With us from Germany. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it, Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering antisemitism as an adult. Arendt later wrote about Varnhagen that she was my very closest woman friend, during the philosophy course taught by Heidegger, she fell in love with her married professor, and a relationship began. In 1929, when Heidegger failed to recognize her at a station, Arendt was devastated, writing, When I was a small child. I had read the tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him anymore. My mother pretended that had happened to me, I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying, but I am your child, I am your Hannah. —That is what it was like today. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders, the dissertation was published in 1929. In 1932, Arendt was deeply troubled by reports that Heidegger was speaking at National Socialist meetings, Heidegger wrote back to her and in his letter did not seek to deny the rumors, and merely assured her that his feelings for her were unchanged. Arendt was prevented from habilitating because she was Jewish and she researched antisemitism for some time before being arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933. While in France, she worked to support and aid Jewish refugees, in 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, like many others, Arendt was able to leave Gurs after a few weeks, and left France in 1941 with her husband and her mother, traveling via Portugal to the United States. They relied on visas illegally issued by the American diplomat Hiram Bingham, varian Fry, another American humanitarian, paid for their travel and helped obtain the visas. Upon arriving in New York, Arendt became active in the German-Jewish community, from 1941 to 1945, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper Aufbau. From 1944, she directed research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, during World War II, Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization, which saved thousands of children from the Holocaust and settled them in the British Mandate of Palestine

8.
Walter Benjamin
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Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with such as playwright Bertolt Brecht. He was also related by law to German political theorist Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to his cousin, Günther Anders. Among Benjamins best known works are the essays The Task of the Translator, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Theses on the Philosophy of History. His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory. He also made translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal. In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from invading Nazi forces, though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown. Benjamin and his siblings, Georg and Dora, were born to a wealthy business family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in the Berlin of the German Empire. He owned a number of investments in Berlin, including ice skating rinks, in 1902, ten-year-old Walter was enrolled to the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg, he completed his secondary school studies ten years later. Here Benjamin had his first exposure to the ideas of Zionism and this exposure gave him occasion to formulate his own ideas about the meaning of Judaism. In Benjamins formulation his Jewishness meant a commitment to the furtherance of European culture, Benjamin expressed My life experience led me to this insight, the Jews represent an elite in the ranks of the spiritually active. For Judaism is to me in no sense an end in itself and this was a position that Benjamin largely held lifelong. Elected president of the Freie Studentenschaft, Benjamin wrote essays arguing for educational and general cultural change, in 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Benjamin began faithfully translating the works of the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. The next year,1915, he moved to Munich, and continued his schooling at the University of Munich, where he met Rainer Maria Rilke and Gershom Scholem, in that year, Benjamin wrote about the 18th-century Romantic German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. In 1917 he transferred to the University of Bern, there, he met Ernst Bloch and they had a son, Stefan Rafael. In 1919 Benjamin earned his Ph. D. cum laude with the dissertation Begriff der Kunstkritik in der Deutschen Romantik, later, unable to support himself and family, he returned to Berlin and resided with his parents. In 1921 he published the essay Kritik der Gewalt, at this time Benjamin first became socially acquainted with Leo Strauss, and Benjamin would remain an admirer of Strauss and of his work throughout his life. In 1923, when the Institut für Sozialforschung was founded, later to become home to the Frankfurt School, Benjamin published Charles Baudelaire, at that time he became acquainted with Theodor Adorno and befriended Georg Lukács, whose The Theory of the Novel much influenced him

9.
Martin Buber
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Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, he became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, in 1923, Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du, and in 1925, he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language. He was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature ten times, Martin Buber was born in Vienna to an Orthodox Jewish family. His grandfather, Solomon Buber, was a scholar of Midrash. At home Buber spoke Yiddish and German, in 1892 Buber returned to his fathers house in Lemberg, todays Lviv, Ukraine. The latter two, in particular, inspired him to studies in philosophy. In 1896, Buber went to study in Vienna, in 1898, he joined the Zionist movement, participating in congresses and organizational work. In 1899 while studying in Zürich, Buber met his wife, Paula Winkler. In 1930, Buber became a professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an important body as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, Mandate Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology. Buber was a descendant of the prominent 16th century rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, known as the Maharam of Padua, as was his cousin. Karl Marx is another notable relative, Bubers wife Paula died in 1958, and he died at his home in the Talbiya neighborhood of Jerusalem on June 13,1965. They had two children, a son, Rafael Buber and a daughter, Eva Strauss-Steinitz, Bubers evocative, sometimes poetic, writing style marked the major themes in his work, the retelling of Hasidic and Chinese tales, Biblical commentary, and metaphysical dialogue. A cultural Zionist, Buber was active in the Jewish and educational communities of Germany and he was also a staunch supporter of a binational solution in Palestine, and after the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, of a regional federation of Israel and Arab states. His influence extends across the humanities, particularly in the fields of psychology, social philosophy. Bubers attitude towards Zionism was tied to his desire to promote a vision of Hebrew humanism, according to Laurence J. Accordingly, the task of Israel as a distinct nation was inexorably linked to the task of humanity in general. Approaching Zionism from his own viewpoint, Buber disagreed with Theodor Herzl about the political and cultural direction of Zionism

10.
Albert Camus
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Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as a follower of it, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations, No, Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. Camus was born in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family and studied at the University of Algiers, in 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA. Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Dréan in French Algeria and his mother was of Spanish descent and could only hear out of her left ear. His father, Lucien, an agricultural worker of Alsatian descent, was wounded in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I. Lucien died from his wounds in an army hospital on 11 October. Camus and his mother, a house cleaner, lived without many basic material possessions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers. In 1923, Camus was accepted into the Lycée Bugeaud and eventually was admitted to the University of Algiers, after he contracted tuberculosis in 1930, he had to end his football activities, he had been a goalkeeper for a prominent Algerian university team. In addition, he was able to study part-time. To earn money, he took odd jobs, as a tutor, car parts clerk. Camus joined the French Communist Party in early 1935, seeing it as a way to fight inequalities between Europeans and natives in Algeria. He did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, in 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party was founded. Camus joined the activities of the Algerian Peoples Party, which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades, Camus then became associated with the French anarchist movement. The anarchist André Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Étudiants Anarchistes as a sympathiser familiar with anarchist thought, Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La révolution Prolétarienne, and Solidaridad Obrera, the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Camus stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the uprising of 1953 in East Germany and he again allied with the anarchists in 1956, first in support of the workers uprising in Poznań, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution

Walter Benjamin's grave in Portbou. The epitaph in German, repeated in Catalan, quotes from Section 7 of Theses on the Philosophy of History: "There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism"